I had arrived in Australia two days prior but already felt like I wasn’t fitting in. The harsh adjustment not only to a new community, but an entirely new country was tough. I don’t remember who I was speaking with, I just remember angrily mumbling something about ‘I’m not sure if I’ll stay or if I’m gonna leave.’
Did I know where I’d go? Of course not. I just wanted to show them. As in, That’s what they get for not letting me fit in.
It’s always worth pointing out that most, if not all of these feelings have more to do with what happens inside of me and my own perceptions than with how other people actually treat me.
Years later, I was sitting in a Starbucks in Chicago. I had been at Moody Bible Institute a total of a week and a half and was sitting with the guy who lived two doors down from me. I told him I didn’t know if I’d stick it out at Moody.
“Not even sure I’ll finish out the semester,” I told him in an attempt to act casually apathetic.
He later told me that’s why he couldn’t ever connect with me on a deep level: He always felt like I was about to take off.
A few nights ago I was on the phone with a good friend of mine and we began talking about our childhoods. He was bullied in 5th and 6th grades, and this sense of not-fitting-in led him to dip his toes into thoughts of suicide. “I even held a pocketknife to my throat at one point,” he confessed, “but ended up throwing it across the room.”
Now a clinical psychologist and counselor, he pointed out an important note: Most people who contemplate suicide don’t want to die; they just want out of their current situation. As a middle schooler, he saw no other path out of his reality of being a bullied outcast. As adults, though, this can look vastly different.
Last night I was on the phone with another close friend who confessed similar feelings haunting him throughout his life. Like me, he has traveled the world and bounced around a fair amount. Like me, he struggles to find a comfortable niche within society and even within a church. Like me, he often opts to leave rather than stay.
But unlike me, he has suicidal tendencies rise up from time to time.
And that’s when it clicked.
We who bounce about the globe under the veneer of ‘finding ourselves’ or ‘world/self-exploration’ are simply self-destructive misfits too afraid to pull the trigger.
He gave breath to the phrase, I just named it: The Optimist’s Suicide.
I have never had suicidal thoughts, so it was jarring to realize that much of my behavior throughout my life reeks of some sort of watered-down suicide.
I want to leave my current situation because I feel like I don’t fit in: Check.
In some deep-seated, angsty way, I want to show the people who didn’t accept me: Check.
But at least I’m hopeful that OVER THERE, things will be better: Check.
When you want the simultaneous attention and seclusion of/from society but you don’t want the downsides of suicide (read: death), you leave.
You move.
You take a job in a new country because not only does the grass look much lusher, but your extant problems don’t exist there either [yet].
“I’ve spent most of my life hiding behind a veneer of cynicism and critique when in reality I’m terrified every time I talk to another human being,” my friend told me on the phone. I was stunned because my friend is not only brilliant and funny but has always carried an air of confidence and self-awareness.
Turns out no one is as healthy as they appear.